Colouring for Compassion: Paint Advice for Aged Care Facilities
The physical environment plays a profound role in shaping our emotional and physical wellbeing. When it comes to aged care facilities, creating spaces that provide comfort, safety, and a sense of home requires a lot of care and thought.
Decoration, architecture and colour schemes all play an important part in the design process. When it comes to paint choices, a blend of aesthetics and functionality is vital for aged care facilities as they need to play multiple roles, including medical space and home.
Selecting the right type of paint to meet these specific needs requires an expert touch. We’ve collated a few need-to-knows when selecting paint colours for aged care facilities.
Colour choice matters
Different hues can have a significant impact on our overall well-being.
Colour can be used to indicate action, such as green for “go” in some settings. It can also be used to influence mood and human behaviour in residential and commercial spaces.
Whilst colour psychology is not an exact science, certain colours have been shown to elicit similar psychological and physiological responses across different cultures. When selecting paint colours for interior design purposes, it’s imperative to consider these psychological responses, especially from a therapeutic perspective.
For example, in aged care facilities, soft, warm tones such as subtle blues and greens may help to induce feelings of calmness and tranquillity and may help to lower blood pressure. Similarly, the use of yellows may help to create a space that is warm, uplifting and inviting.
Whatever colour you choose for these spaces will also have to fit into your overall colour scheme for the facility. It’s worth getting a colour expert on your side to strategise the whole scheme right from the beginning.
Make it bright & light
Older residents may be vision-impaired or suffer from mobility issues. They may also have neurological or memory-related illnesses, making it difficult to remember directions or recognise once-familiar spaces.
Colour and contrast play a significant role in making spaces easier and safer to navigate.
Adding a lightness with brighter contrast for paint choices can amplify and maximise the light reflectance in spaces, helping to counteract reduced vision in residents, often associated with ageing. Bold or deeper, contrasting colours are often used by wayfinding experts to help residents differentiate between spaces in a facility.
Similarly, colours on handrails and special signage (i.e. pictures and words) can provide necessary visual cues for residents to help them to navigate the smaller areas of a space, thereby reducing the risk of falls or accidents.
Knowing the right colour mix to improve wayfinding in aged care facilities requires a range of particular skills. A colour expert is the perfect partner to help to enhance the wayfinding in any built environment, including aged care facilities.
Select for durability and safety
Aesthetics are of vital importance when selecting the optimal paint colour for aged care facilities.
Paint choices also need to be easy to clean and maintain and be durable enough to withstand daily wear and tear.
Low-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paints can go a long way to ensuring that the indoor air quality remains healthy. Durability is also an important choice factor, along with paints that are mould and mildew-resistant or need to withstand frequent cleaning.
Knowing which specifically designed paint to choose for environments that have to balance clinical and homely needs can be tricky. With a paint expert on your team, selecting for practicality and aesthetics becomes a much easier balance to strike.
Ask the paint experts
Selecting the perfect paint balance aesthetics, functionality, and the emotional well-being of aged care residents can be overwhelming.
By opting into our Paint, Paint Accessories & Graffiti Removal Services contract with Dulux, you’ll have a team of experts standing by to help select the perfect colour and repair it when needed.
